


melanocorypha calandra

by knowyourwayinthedark



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Gen, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-03
Updated: 2013-11-03
Packaged: 2017-12-31 09:51:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1030274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knowyourwayinthedark/pseuds/knowyourwayinthedark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety. He who felt that he could never do anything but crawl, walk at the most, beheld wings sprouting on Cosette."</p>
<p>...taken literally.</p>
            </blockquote>





	melanocorypha calandra

The ground would have been stark, ugly, at any other time, but the light just before dawn lent it a silent dignity; the stripped-clean field like a shaved head, a plucked fowl, but beautiful in its desolation.

A bird sang, and as if in answer, Cosette shivered; Valjean watched, as the cloth over her back lifted, and perceived the movements of feathers beneath.

She had taken to releasing her wings as of late, during their morning excursions, stretching them towards the sky streaked pale with the beginnings of light, and every day Jean Valjean noted how much larger they had become, how much deeper and richer their color, near black underneath but like fine-grained wood on top, rimmed with white at the tip of each feather. They had come, like her prettiness, as a surprise to her; unlike her looks, they had grown more slowly. Now when she loosed them from her dress and unfolded them they stretched wide and stirred the air with a soft, restrained power, and with a pang in his heart Valjean noted that the lightness of Cosette’s being was perfectly suited to flight.

Cosette, today, only stood and curled her wings about her body like a cape, the early morning too cold for anything much more than contemplation of the sky or the expanse of the field, watching the beginnings of the sunrise. Valjean, in his turn, watched Cosette. For a moment his thoughts drifted back to darker times: he thought of crumpled feathers, rimmed with frost and dragging in the frozen mud; he thought of feathers torn loose or fallen from illness onto white linen. But as the sky grew pinker and the world began to buzz with the song of awakening insects, the clear tones of the lark slowly being joined by others in the same sweet symphony – he felt that her presence was sunrise enough, that no shadow could possibly block the light she emitted into his life, no cloud or predatory wingspan could or ought to eclipse it. 

Then – “There is someone coming, Papa,” Cosette said, pointing, and Valjean looked, and saw, the dark and miasmic shape proceeding down the highway.

It was a procession of several wagons, accompanied by men with muskets and the sounds of shouts, the jangling of chains, every so often the crack of a whip. The figures on them were hunched, formless, but the jagged outcroppings rising from the shoulders of a few of them, tattered with some feathers still remaining, could be discerned in the dim light. Jean Valjean shivered.

Cosette shivered, too, her wings pressing tightly around her body as if in sympathy – for no doubt she had seen, by now, the torn and broken stumps marking those men as repeat offenders or runaways, their wings wrenched off and heavy iron hung around their necks. “Papa, what are they?” she asked, “what are those men, in those wagons?”

“They are convicts.”

There was inexpressible fear and confusion on her face; she drew her wings in closer to herself. “Where do they go?”

“To prison.”

Her eyes tracked their motions, across every terrible face and clenched hand and twisted scowl. “Papa,” she said, at last, “are they still men?”

The remains of his wings lay folded flat against his back, too mangled to ever quite manage flight again.

“Sometimes,” said Jean Valjean.

**Author's Note:**

> (what IS past tense????? we just don't know)
> 
> uh basically the only reason I am bothering to put this in a separate work and title this is so I can finally point and go, look, I do write things that are gen and G-rated and have girls in them, now my Works page is not quite as exclusively red and blue due to the sheer amount of male/male porno. Except I still am not sure of my ability to write girl and yeah??? I ripped a lot of this straight from the Brick and uh yeah also I ran with the whole lark thing somewhat excessively so Cosette's wings are like a calandra lark's and
> 
> guys I have no real excuse for this???? Please write more Cosette wingfic, someone who is better at wingfic and Cosette than I am. All I can do is hideous amounts of Valjean feels by basically repeating entire scenes from the Brick. gomen


End file.
